FORT MEADE IS MORE LIKE A TOWN THAN A BASE, AND MARYLAND’S largest employer.
The route is dotted with faux plantation-style houses, boxy barrack blocks, offices and administrative complexes. The HQ building of the National Security Agency dominates the skyline, a dark glass Rubik’s Cube four times the size of the Capitol where tens of thousands of analysts sift the world’s emails and phone conversations for snippets of intelligence that allow America to stay ahead of her enemies – and her friends.
The Cube now hovers the other side of the trees as I park in front of the INSCOM facility. A sign directs me to 902nd Military Intelligence Visitor Reception.
The General is waiting two levels below ground, in a Secure Compartmented Information Facility with a table at its center, a couple of phones, and two flat-screen TVs on the walls. Like Hetta’s fancy briefcase, it’s totally impervious to electronic surveillance.
After stints with the Rangers and Delta, Alexander ‘Zan’ Johansson rose rapidly through Special Operations Command, juggling high-level strategy with protracted stints in the field. Having served in every theater of war in which the US has been engaged since 9/11, the General recently took command of JaySOC and the war on terror.
He gets to his feet and runs a hand over a pate that looks as if it’s been sprinkled with iron filings. He’s in combats, and taller and more greyhound-lean than I expected.
His grip is vise-like and he’s clearly very pissed. Since his return from whatever war zones he’s just visited in the Middle East and North Africa, he’s been inundated with legal requests by Christy’s team to divulge exactly what he knows.
He points to the bruises on my face. ‘Been mixing it with the locals, Colonel?’
‘A little car trouble is all, General.’
There’s a knock at the door. Hetta looks hot and flustered. She’s spent the morning back at her office in D.C.
‘And this is Special Agent Hart of the Secret Service’s Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division.’
‘No apology necessary,’ Johansson says. His sarcasm soars right over her head.
She places her phone on the table and switches it to record.
To accommodate us in his schedule, Johansson has flown up from Fort Bragg. After we’ve finished with him, he’ll fly to the Pentagon, where he is due to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on his recent tour.
‘General …’ Hetta positions her two pens very precisely either side of her notebook. ‘This session will be conducted in accordance with the United States Secret Service’s investigation into the shooting of Duke Gapes, an intelligence operative under your command. Did you know Gapes, sir?’
‘Never met him.’
‘Perhaps, then, you’d explain the chain of command.’
Johansson doesn’t refer to any notes. He casts a wary eye at Hetta.
‘Our enemies know that to resort to conventional communications means we will hunt them down and kill them. INSCOM drafted a proposal to restart the remote viewing program in the wake of 9/11 and you can say what you like about the use of psychics, but the results have been spectacular.’
Hetta picks up one of her pens, scribbles something, then sets it back down and looks at the General. ‘So, your command tasks Army Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM, with providing special intelligence to the Activity, the unit Gapes was attached to.’
Johansson grunts.
‘Shall I take that as a yes, General?’
A flicker of annoyance crosses Johansson’s face. It’s enough to suggest that, as far as he is concerned, Secret Service agents belong in the same category as politicians and news-hounds.
‘Gapes’s decision to go AWOL must have come as a blow, then.’
‘A unit of this kind only works if it’s secret.’
Hetta picks up her pen and starts writing again. ‘We know that the order to shoot Gapes was a direct result of a hacked data breach within the Metropolitan Police Department’s supposedly secure tactical radio net. That takes some doing, wouldn’t you say?’
Johansson leans forward. ‘We are fighting a sophisticated enemy, Miss Hart. For years, we’ve stopped nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, because between the Russians and ourselves we know the location of every last gram of uranium and plutonium on the planet. And if it moves, we track it, because uranium and plutonium carry signatures that are visible to our sensors. You want to know what keeps me awake nights? The thought that one day those sensors will blink and we fail to locate and track a weapon the Islamists have assembled.’
‘The terrorists you describe would have the sophistication to mount an operation like this?’
‘An operation like what?’
‘Some kind of nuclear event.’ She unfolds a piece of paper and sets it down on the table in front of him. It’s the planetary shell from the cabin. ‘Do you know what this is, General?’
Johansson looks at the sketch, then at Hetta. ‘No.’ His tone is level.
‘What about the Engineer?’
Johansson stares at her. ‘You think that is the key to this freak show?’
Hetta stops writing. ‘Care to explain what you mean by that, sir?’
‘Sure.’ Johansson breathes in. ‘Almost thirty years ago, we mounted a deeply covert operation to undermine the southern states of the new Russia – an area broadly described as the North Caucasus. In amongst the Afghans, Saudis, Turks, Pakistanis and the whole fuckin’ circus looking to continue the fight after beating the Soviets in Afghanistan, the CIA implanted this idea there was a new breed of leader in the region that would rally its inhabitants to an unstoppable cause. Russian clean-up operations in Chechnya were, to a large extent, a testament to the effectiveness of that operation.’
The General leans forward. ‘The Engineer, Miss Hart, is what is known in the trade as “blowback”: a myth come full circle to haunt us. What our beloved Agency did was to create leaders-in-waiting with superhuman powers, who have been folded into Islamist lore by desperate people in search of another bin Laden. The guy who is going to come back at the Last Judgment to save his people. Only he ain’t, because he ain’t fuckin’ real.’
A bitter east wind is driving the clouds low and inland, obscuring our view of the Cube, as I check my messages on the steps of the portico two floors above the bunker.
I have a WhatsApp from Christy: One down, two to go.
OK. I now have some context for Hetta, the General and the shell.
‘You were right. It is a component for a nuke,’ Hetta says. ‘It’s called a ballotechnic, and it’s an initiator. A trigger. A highly specialized one. Byford fixed me up with a proliferation expert who’d never seen anything like it. He’s the reason I was late.’
‘Go on.’
‘A regular hydrogen bomb needs an atom bomb to trigger the fusion reaction. A Gen 4 nuke uses this instead.’
‘How?’
‘With difficulty, thank God. Basically, it’s a material that’s designed to explode when given a shock of sufficient intensity. But nobody has got one to work. Not even our weapons geniuses.’
‘What if he authorized the removal of those images from the cabin?’
‘Johansson?’
‘Yes.’ I decide to ignore for the moment what we agreed with Christy: that we’d keep our knowledge of the three excised images from the cabin to ourselves. ‘You took a risk by showing it to him.’
‘The bastard was playing poker with us. I just raised the stakes a little.’
‘How?’
‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’
When we take the elevator back down for Session Two, the General has been joined by a balding, heavy-set man with wire-framed eyeglasses.
Major Cal Offutt is thirty-eight, according to his documents. He looks older. He extends his hand. I’m set to shake it when I see he has three fingers missing and the two that remain are black and twisted like the roots of a tree.
‘The General told me you’d been cleared and briefed,’ he says.
‘Partially. I didn’t know you were with Gapes when he crashed.’
‘Duke and I … we … we went through a lot together.’
‘You OK to tell me what happened?’
‘We were inserting a recon team on the Syria–Iraq border when we got daisy-chained by improvised bombs. One of them severed the tail boom and we went down. I pulled Duke clear just before the tanks exploded. There were no other survivors. If it hadn’t been for—’
‘Hadn’t been for what?’ Hetta says, far too quickly.
I shoot her a look. She doesn’t get it, but Offutt does.
‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘It’s a story I need to tell, and there’s not many I can tell it to. I dragged him into some cover and we lay low. By morning the insurgents had gone, but Duke was in a bad way. His burns were terrible. I carried him far as I could, but I could see he was going to die.
‘If I continued to carry him, he’d die slow and in pain. If I went for help, he’d die, too, but maybe without as much pain. We reached a village – a place called Sweet Water in Arabic – and the locals seemed friendly enough. I left him there and went with an elder to see if we could find one of our patrols. Long story short, we got picked up by helo and I directed the crew back to the village, where I was sure we’d find Duke with his throat cut.
‘But you know what? Even though those people had nothing – no medicine, little food, only that sweet water – they looked after him. And they prayed. They prayed all night. And by God’s grace, they said, Duke would live if He so willed it. Well, Colonel Cain, He must have willed something, because against all the odds, Duke did survive.’
We get down to business.
‘I will be leading this session, Major Offutt; Agent Hart will observe. You will have been told, I’m sure, that I’m a psychiatrist. You will also know that I was in the church tower seeking to talk your former colleague down when he was killed. It’s clear from evidence we’ve drawn from the time he spent on the run that he had developed some particular obsessions – one of them being with me, another with President Thompson. I am especially keen to learn anything you can tell us about his mental state in the years he worked with you; also about the remote viewing process itself.’
‘Yes, sir. Are you familiar with the protocols?’
‘Not especially.’
‘We still use a forty-year-old method called CRV – coordinate remote viewing – which involves my sitting in an insulated room with the viewer, reading out a set of coordinates and then listening to the viewer’s impressions of the target. For the most part, as the monitor, I rarely intervene. But occasionally, I direct. If the viewer is having difficulty, for example, I might encourage him or her to look at the target from a different angle. Or at the prevailing conditions. Whether it’s hot or cold. Wet or dry. If there are people in the vicinity. You get the idea. If nothing’s happening, I can even ask them to go forward or backward in time to—’
‘I didn’t realize—’
‘Oh, yeah. A good viewer can roam across time. Used in the right way, and in conjunction with conventional intelligence methods, remote viewing is a tremendous asset.’
‘Gapes – was he good?’
‘The best.’
‘What makes a good viewer?’
‘Good question. He and I used to discuss that a lot.’
‘You were friends?’
‘Yes, sir. You can’t do something like this and not be.’ He pauses. ‘Even Duke didn’t understand how he did the things he was able to do. He’d had the odd psychic experience as a kid – premonitions and such – but it was only after the brain injury his talent really kicked in. Nobody could access the signal line quite like him.’
He sees that I’m struggling and adds: ‘Back in the day, they ran all kinds of tests. They put remote viewers in rooms like this one and found that they could still receive the target information.’
‘So, this … signal line? This line between the viewer and the data they pick up from the target? It isn’t electromagnetic?’
‘It can’t be.’
‘So, what is it?’
‘We don’t know. But whatever it is, it has to be some facet of us – or of the world around us – that is very subtle.’
He hesitates. ‘You take any physics, Colonel?’
‘I’m a doctor. I have some.’
He sits up and it’s like, suddenly, he comes alive. ‘There are two aspects to quantum mechanics that resonate with remote viewers. When you measure the position of a particle – an electron or a photon, say – all information about its speed and direction, its momentum, vanish. And vice versa. Which is weird, huh? It’s like we can’t know both at the same moment, only ever one of them.
‘Well, viewers will tell you that’s what reality is. When they click into that other place, whatever that other place is, it’s like they click out of this world. I wouldn’t begin to know how to describe it, but hyperspace is a start, or another dimension. A good viewer, like Duke, can … could … flip seamlessly between the two.’
Johansson looks at his watch. Before he can interrupt, I ask Offutt about the second aspect.
‘In the quantum field, everything is entangled. No matter how separated two particles become, once they’ve formed a connection, they communicate with each other instantly, whatever the distance, and continue to, whether they’re next door or separated by an entire galaxy – and from now till the end of time. That’s how remote viewing is. The viewer connects to the target instantly, no matter how far away it is, and we think—’
‘Major,’ Johansson says, ‘if the Colonel and Agent Hart required a physics lesson, I’m sure they’d have gone to MI-fuckin’-T.’
‘Sure.’ Offutt glances from Hetta to me.
‘We’re trying to understand what made him run,’ I say.
‘Wasn’t that established by the MPs?’
‘The MPs were never made aware of the fact that he was working with the Activity. Did he ever share anything with you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He just left?’
He nods. ‘One day he was here, right here. The next …’ He does this thing with the fingers of his good hand to show how Duke vanished into thin air.
I glance down at my notes. ‘Would you describe Gapes as religious, Major?’
‘Duke? Spiritual, perhaps. But not religious.’
‘How would you define the difference?’
‘It’s hard to work in this area and not have a sense of connection with the great unknown. Duke did. I’m not a viewer, and I do. But the Christian thing? No. He wasn’t into that at all.’
‘Any affiliations with extremists? The far right?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No way. In any case, we were polygraphed every couple of months. If Duke had belonged to any kind of proscribed organization, the lie-detector Gestapo would have known.’
‘What about his mental state?’
He describes some of the symptoms I saw in the tower: the speech and muscle spasms that were the result of the brain injury he received in Iraq. He confirms what I’d read in his medical report, that he got bad headaches, too. But when I ask if Gapes was delusional, Offutt shakes his head.
‘You mean, like, serious mental issues? No way. Actually, I—’
Johansson cuts across him. ‘The guy was clearly sick.’
Hetta looks up sharply from her notes. ‘You said that you and Gapes never met?’
‘Correct.’
‘Then how can you know?’
‘Know what?’
‘That he was sick.’
‘Check out his psych report. The guy was delusional and on medication. An anti-psychotic.’
‘It’s highly likely that his notes had been doctored,’ I say. ‘And besides, it’s hard to be mentally ill and a bona fide traitor, isn’t it?’
Johansson’s expression drops another ten degrees. ‘Your specialism is post-traumatic stress, correct?’
‘It is, yes.’
‘Do you know how much trauma my men get to encounter every day of the week?’
‘I ran a center for the treatment of trauma-related illness, General. So yes, I do.’
‘Then, under your classification, I have no doubt that half the men under my command suffer some form of PTSD. But you know what? They just get on with the job. They do it because they have a keen sense of patriotism. Duty, Colonel. Every day, they die to keep us safe.’ He looks at his watch. ‘This interview is now terminated. I have transport waiting to take me to the Pentagon.’
‘General Johansson?’
He turns impatiently to Hetta. She doesn’t move a muscle.
‘As I made clear, sir, this is an official investigation into multiple murder and a conspiracy to kill the President. It will be over when we say it is.’
Johansson stiffens. The glint of steel in his gray eyes tells me that the appeal of Hetta’s imminent rendition may have crossed his mind. But he maintains his silence.
I turn back to Offutt. ‘When we were in the tower, Duke said something that I’m struggling to understand. He talked about ground truth.’
‘Yes.’ The Major glances uneasily at Johansson.
‘What is it?’
‘It has military, er, usage, of course …’
‘Beyond that?’
‘Duke and I …’
I wait.
‘Viewers need feedback, Colonel. When you remote view, you’re not always convinced that what you’ve seen is real. So feedback from the target becomes important. It helps the viewer to refine his accuracy. To know he’s on the right path. It was the primary reason we started collocating viewers with the Activity’s assault units – so that they could get near instant feedback.’
‘Duke said that he’d found ground truth by looking at me. What could he have possibly meant by that?’
‘Easy,’ Offutt says. ‘It meant you were the target.’